All Things News

Straight from the Denver Post: “John Mark Karr’s DNA is not a match with material found at the scene of the JonBenet Ramsey murder, according to KUSA-TV, 9 News.”

Straight from Slashdot: “According to an article in the NYT, an Iranian heavy water nuke plant goes online today. From the article: ‘An Iranian plant that produces heavy water officially went into operation on Saturday, despite U.N. demands that Tehran stop the activity because it can be used to develop a nuclear bomb. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated the plant, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes. The announcement comes days before Thursday’s U.N. deadline for Iran to stop uranium enrichment — which also can be used to create nuclear weapons — or face economic and political sanctions.’”

Straight from CNN: “Iran test fired a long-range, radar-evading missile on Sunday from a submarine in the Gulf as part of war games that began earlier this month, state television reported.The missile was called Sagheb, which means Piercing, but the report did not give the missile’s range.

“Minutes ago it was launched from a submarine in the Persian Gulf and it hit the target,” television reported.

Western nations have been watching developments in Iran’s missile capabilities with concern amid a standoff over the country’s nuclear program, which the West says is aimed at building atomic bombs. Iran says the program is only civilian.

Iran’s military also held war games in the Gulf in April. Those exercises were interpreted by analysts as a thinly veiled threat that Iran could disrupt vital oil shipping lanes if pushed by an escalation in the nuclear dispute.

A navy admiral, named only as Kouchaki, told state television the missile had been designed and produced in Iran.

“It can be installed and launched by Iran’s navy. It is a long-range missile, with a very high speed and destructive power. It is also radar evading,” he said.

The Islamic Republic has three aging Kilo class diesel-electric Russian submarines and also builds midget submarines. The Sagheb is listed as an air defense missile by the Nuclear Threat Initiative Web site (www.nti.org).

Military analysts say Iran often exaggerates its abilities, They argue that its military equipment is outmoded and that new missiles Iran claims to have produced are often modified versions from other countries such as North Korea.”

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Straight from Gizmodo: “When the RIAA sued the children of a dead man accused of infringement, the hapless organization was met with outrage from all sides. Now the RIAA has backed off that idea, issuing a statement: “Out of an abundance of sensitivity, we have elected to drop this particular case.” Yeah, right. That wasn’t enough for Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, who ground the RIAA weasels’ noses into the carpet whence they just shat and pissed:

The RIAA’s approach to PR is much like their approach to culture in general: read-only. The RIAA issues statements like the Pope emitting a bull, and we mortals may squabble over its meaning among ourselves, but they are not available to participate in any further discussion. This is reminiscent of the RIAA’s approach to things like YouTube lipsynch videos: “our songs are released to be listened to and nothing more; should you dare to make them part of your life, we will use the copyright law we bought to break you.”

Suing grandmas, children and even dead people’s children? There’s got to be a better way than this. One solution to this problem is to just abandon all products covered by the RIAA.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “In the case of Warner et al v. Scantlebury, yet another individual was targeted by seven record labels looking for restitution of the horrible damages inflicted by the alleged downloading of music files. Most of the case documents are not publicly available at this point, and the suit was not highly publicised until now, so it’s hard to find any real detail on the charges involved.Larry Scantlebury had the temerity to die before the case was resolved, though. Again, the cause of death is unknown, but the RIAA did get a hold of a death certificate. It was filed as support for a motion to “stay the case for 60 days and extend all deadlines 60 days,” filed by the record labels’ lawyers. The reason for the stay request is this:

“Plaintiffs do not believe it appropriate to discuss a resolution of the case with the family so close to Mr. Scantlebury’s passing. Plaintiffs therefore request a stay of 60 days to allow the family additional time to grieve.”

How quaintly civil of them. Because the litigants believed that the case was nearing a resolution before Larry’s passing, it wants to move on with the proceedings rather than drop the case, and will request depositions from his heirs after the 60-day grieving period. Considering that deceased Enron executive Ken Lay’s assets may be safe from legal action after his death, the recording industry’s tenacity in this case is astounding.”

Straight from Slashdot: “Otago University researchers are concerned by U.S. plans to protect satellites from solar storms… “The approach, which is being considered by the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, involves using very low frequency radio waves to flush particles from belts and dump them into the upper atmosphere over either one or several days”. The plan could disrupt GPS signals and high frequency radio over the Pacific for up to a week. “The disruptions result from a deluge of dumped charged particles temporarily changing the ionosphere from a “mirror” that bounces high frequency radio waves around the planet to a “sponge” that soaks them up.”"

Pirate Party Launches World’s First Commercial Darknet
“The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced, and can pump data well over 10 megabits per second.”
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Conan the Barbarian [2008]

Mongol General: We have won again. That is good! But what is best in life?
Mongolian trainee: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcon on your wrist, wind in your hair!
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!
Mongol General: That is good.

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Straight from Slashdot: “Windows’ PatchGuard seems to be upsetting third party security vendors such as Symantec, Sana Security and Agnitum. It sounds like the ‘black hats’ will be able to bypass this security feature (which will be in all copies of Vista) but force security software companies to give up developing software for Windows. From the article: ‘PatchGuard will make it harder for third parties, particularly host intrusion-prevention software, to function in Vista,’ said Yankee Group analyst Andrew Jaquith. ‘Third parties have two choices: continue to petition Microsoft to create an approved kernel-hooking interface so products like theirs can work, or use “black hat” techniques to bypass the restrictions.’ Apparently, using these techniques is not a difficult trick.”

Straight from LGF News: “Conclusive proof that the photographs from Qana were cynically staged, as “Green Helmet” directs cameramen in a video from German TV (with English subtitles). They actually take the body of a child out of the ambulance, transfer it from the light stretcher used in the ambulance to the heavy duty gurney used in the rescue operation (to create the impression that it has just arrived from the bombed area), uncover it, and pose it for photographs.”

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Straight from Slashdot: “The New York Times reports that the respected astrophysicist, James A. Van Allen, died yesterday at the age of 91. Apparently the fellow regularly worked at his office/laboratory up until a month ago. Prof. Van Allen team designed the Geiger counter that flew aboard Americas first orbiting satellite, Explorer 1. It detected unexpectedly intense levels of radiation caused by energetic particles trapped in the Earth magnetic field, the magnetosphere. The belts of radiation were mapped and characterised by later missions and were named the Van Allen belts in honour of their discoverer.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Consumer Electronics Association President and CEO Gary Shapiro is frustrated with the music industry. While the consumer electronics industry works to find a middle ground between the interests of electronics manufacturers and rights holders, the RIAA has failed to participate. To make matters worse, despite their lack of participation, the RIAA is currently lobbying members of Congress to push through the controversial audio broadcast flag; its passage would trump the efforts of the Copy Protection Technical Working Group.The RIAA is a late-comer to the “flag”-method of content control, which can be generically described as follows: mandate all broadcasters to use technology to embed mandated “flags” that are then “respected” by hardware designed under mandate to obey the mandatory behavior. That’s a lot of mandates, but that’s what the broadcast flag is all about: using the law to first re-define and then enforce a new copyright regime under the guise of digital rights management.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “Last December, I wrote about a team that was constructing a plugin for Firefox called AllPeers. Claiming that their product would be “The best thing to happen to Firefox… since Firefox,” the AllPeers plugin promised to make file sharing between friends easy and efficient. At the same time, supporters of the service proclaimed that it would protect its users from lawsuits from the RIAA and MPAA due to its darknet architecture.Now, after many months of development, AllPeers is finally ready to unveil its technology to the world. The application is scheduled to be released later today, albeit in beta form. According to the AllPeers CEO and project leader, Cedric Maloux, the plugin represents more than 200,000 lines of C++ and JavaScript code.”

Straight from Reuters, the “bastion of truth: “BEIRUT (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Friday he could raise 15,000 troops for a United Nations force mandated to police a truce between Israel and Hizbollah, but France called the target excessive.European and other nations have been dithering over how many troops to dispatch on the potentially hazardous mission, despite prompting from the United States, Israel and others.

Asked before talks with European foreign ministers whether he expected to be able to raise all the troops he is seeking, Annan replied: “Not today, but I will get the 15,000.”

But French President Jacques Chirac, whose diplomats helped draft the August 11 Security Council resolution that authorized up to 15,000 peacekeepers to deploy in Lebanon, said he was unsure how many troops were needed but that 15,000 was too many.

The number was “completely excessive”, Chirac told a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris.”

Straight from Fox News: “LOS ANGELES — John Mark Karr first came to the attention of California officials five years ago when he emerged as a potential suspect in the murder of a 12-year-old girl and showed an “apparent fascination” with the murders of JonBenet Ramsey and Polly Klaas.The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, which launched an investigation that would ultimately lead to Karr being charged with child pornography, made the disclosure in a statement Wednesday.

“In a few instances while he seemed to be wondering about the JonBenet Ramsey murder, he made uncertain allusions to placing himself in the killer’s role,” according to a statement by Lt. Dave Edmonds.”"

Straight from the DEBKAfile: “Our military sources report that Hizballah is also working on the rehabilitation of its short-range rocket “Nasser” Brigade – all under cover of the stream of returning south Lebanese refugees. Weapons deliveries from Syria to Lebanon are arriving at an accelerated pace in the last 24 hours, mostly through the northern Beqaa Valley. They are then distributed across Lebanon including the south. Israel is no longer impeding the traffic although it has an all-clear from Washington. Monday, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert praised his Lebanese counterpart Fouad Siniora for his courage and predicted if things carry on this way, it may soon be possible to discuss formalizing relations. However, DEBKAfile discloses that, on the quiet, Siniora has instructed his troops to avoid friction with Hizballah and on no account impound its weapons or obstruct its efforts to regroup. Hassan Nasrallah has reciprocated with orders to his men not to resist if Lebanese soldiers confiscate their weapons because they will be restored through the secret back-door channel conducted by the Lebanese PM. DEBKAfile’s sources add: Siniora has ignored Israel’s complaint through Washington about the arms supplies transiting N. Beqaa. He has made no request to UNIFIL to enforce the UN arms embargo. The situation on the Syrian-Lebanese border is beginning to replicate the open house for arms smuggling that reigned on the Egyptian-Gaza after Israel’s pull-back from Gaza in October 2005. Then too, Israel made effort to hinder the massive influx of terrorist weapons. The Lebanese army’s deployment and patrols are described by Israeli military sources in Lebanon as futile; Hizballah tells them which roads and villages they may enter, and which they may not. UNIFIL’s patrols are likewise a charade. The international force has confined itself to clearing mines; it is not spending any time on enforcing Security Council resolution 1701. Even then, the mine-clearing teams make sure of permission from Hizballah and the Lebanese army before they venture on territories under their control. The mood in Washington over the prospect of getting an effective multinational force deployed in S. Lebanon is downbeat compared with the optimism radiated by Israel’s prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff. Not a single government is willing to contribute a contingent without a clear prescription of permitted dos and don’ts, including the foreign troops’ freedom to defend themselves. UNIFIL has received general authorization to fire in self-defense but it is heavily qualified and still not approved by the Lebanese government.”

From the Northeast Intelligence Network: “Around 11:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 20, 2006, an alert employee working the fuel desk at the Travel America of America Truck Stop on Interstate 80 in Brookville, Pennsylvania noticed that several things were “wrong.” Two men, both of Middle Eastern origin, speaking Arabic and broken English and operating a tractor trailer, with the trailer bearing radioactive cargo placards, provided the travel center false information: fraudulent registration information and a false vehicle identification number.”

Straight from Ars Technica: “When DVDs were first released, they contained an encryption-based copy protection known as CSS. While CSS was relatively simple to crack, this raised all sorts of legal issues about consumer rights and the ability to make backups. It even landed Jon Johansen, the author of DeCSS, in legal trouble, although he was later cleared on appeal in a Norwegian court. Clearly, DVD copying was serious business, and the movie industry was going to fight tooth-and-nail over the issue.Now, it appears that the DVD Copy Control Association, the group in charge of CSS and other forms of copy protection, has decided to loosen the reins (PDF) ever so slightly. No, CSS is not going away, but new rules are being finalized that could make it legal for store “movie jukebox” kiosks to offer burned movies to consumers. The kiosk idea has been around for a while, but the proposed new rules would make the burned DVDs fully CSS compliant and capable of being played back on any DVD player.”

Straight from Slashdot: “In a landmark legal document, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen, the ACLU of Oklahoma Foundation, and the American Association of Law Libraries have submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of the motion for attorneys fees that has been made by Deborah Foster in Capitol Records v. Debbie Foster, in federal court in Oklahoma. This brief is mandatory reading for every person who is interested in the RIAA litigation campaign against consumers.”

Straight from Yahoo News: “Airline passenger Anton Gerasimov enjoys the last drink of his champagne before boarding a flight to Russia, Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006, at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco. Growing lines of irritated travelers snaked through U.S. airport terminals Thursday as people waited hours to reach security checkpoints, where they were ordered to dump all liquids, water bottles, suntan lotion, even toothpaste, following the discovery of a terror plot involving planes leaving Britain. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar)”

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